Dream: The Last Time I Saw Mom. 12/12/2008.

I am in the car with my father, driving down a small commercial street.  It is mid-afternoon and the street is not busy.  He is driving and I am in the passenger seat.  We stop at a red light and my mother, dead now three years, pokes her head in his window.  She is alive again.  She looks younger than she did last, more vivacious, and her hair, though still mostly gray, is cut in a youthful shape.  It frames her face beautifully, adding sharp lines and angular planes to her cheeks and reshaping her chin to a finer point.  Even in the world of the dream I know she cannot be alive, but I find it easy to forget this fact.  I simply don’t care.  It feels so good to see her in the luminous clarity of the dream afternoon that I am exquisitely able to write off the fact of her death.  With her hands resting delicately on the windowsill and her head inside the car, she asks where we are going.
“To the hotel,” my Dad replies.
“Ok,” she says lightly, “we’ll meet you there.”
She tells me she likes my haircut (I just had a trim in waking life) and, before I can respond in kind or ask a question about why we are going to a hotel or who she is with, she says again, with an air of gentle finality this time, “We’ll meet you at the hotel.”
She flashes a bright familiar smile, the kind you give loved ones on no special occasion, and a square of light sticks to her glasses and illuminates her tender blue-gray eyes.  Just then, as if to refute the marvelous smile and the flash of light, a gauzy darkness sweeps in over the back of my mind carrying the message: No, you won’t meet her at the hotel.  This is a terribly eloquent darkness.  It speaks clearly and definitively and it tells me she is gone forever and that her smile vanishing from the frame of the car window is the last image of her I will ever see.  I wake feeling upset and stalk off to the bathroom in a sulk.

Dream: Relief From Below. 12/8/2008.

We’re in bed and I am very much in the mood.  So much, in fact, that my needy insistence drives you to giggling.  You playfully fish around under the covers until you can grasp the expression of my desires in one hand and then you toss the blankets back with the air of a highly amused showman.  This reveals to us both precisely the state that I am in.  My organ, exposed to the cool air of the room, appears ready to give off smoke.  It looks like a red fire hydrant, much shorter and stouter than usual, hot to the touch, and almost vibrating with a lustful intensity of being.  It is the color of a cooked beet and is steaming as though just removed from boiling water.  You can’t help laughing at this development, and for good reason.  Protruding vertically from my lean pale torso, this reproductive folly resembles a round red nose honking out from the center of a clown’s white face.  We both begin to laugh, but you gather from the look of pain flashing across my blanched face that the heavily swollen appendage makes even slight movement uncomfortable for me.  Wearing a look of severe mock concern, you make a play of examining my flooded branch, gently poking and stroking with delicate touches and grimacing as it stiffly rights itself each time you push it away from true north.  This examination seems to unnerve you a bit; perhaps you fear it is demanding something of you that you may not be able to provide.  I begin trying to coax you into some kind of definite action, doing my best to hide the obvious desperation that has joined the note of discomfort in my pleas, when we hear another voice.  It is a young woman’s voice, slightly scolding and annoyed in tone, exhorting us to get on with it already.  Much to our surprise, it’s coming from underneath us.  After a brief, bewildered and (for me) slightly dizzying search, we discover that there is now a good foot of space between the headboard and the wall and that, most shockingly of all, the floor that should anchor that space has vanished.  There is nothing but air between us and the downstairs neighbors.  And that is precisely who has joined our conversation.

A young East-Asian woman lives in the downstairs apartment.  She is standing in a posture of cool annoyance, with her arms crossed over her chest and her head thrown back to look up at us.  Her sensible ensemble, a yellow sweater and tan slacks, and simple shoulder length black hair combine to frame and color a pictorial message that reads: your aimless extravagance endlessly irritates those of us who are trying to get things done.  Why don’t you just quiet down?  I cast an evaluating glance over our current position: I’m laid out like a surgical patient, my naked body half covered, exposed only where the throbbing crimson symptom of absurdity waits to be attended.  You’re in your bra and panties, hair askew and face flushed from laughing, crouched over my torso in an utterly frivolous posture of serious examination.  It dawns on me that we are completely without hope, trapped in our own exquisite uselessness.  No sentence we might string together could rescue us now; no fantastic excuse we might concoct could possibly match the temperate and logical assault of efficacy we face from below.  As the full force of this realization strikes me, compounded by the faint metronomic tapping of a sneaker on the hardwood floor below, I finally, and much to my relief, begin to deflate.  Like so many sufferers before me, I have been cured of fever, confusion, and congestion by a cool breeze.

Daydream at home: Interview. 12/7/2008.

*Occurred in bed, while half awake, putting this right on the cusp between dream and daydream.

I am an older version of myself, mid-30s, pale and a little gaunt.  My nose has grown pointier, extremely long and aquiline, essentially Roman.  I have become a “well known” poet, which means that a few other poets, some academics, and a half dozen hard core fans know who I am and what I look like, while the rest of America is utterly unaware of my existence.  I am sitting for a television interview and have decided to take advantage of my anonymity by dressing up like Dieter from the SNL sketch, “Sprockets”.  I wear a tight black turtleneck and my hair, dyed ink-black, is heavily greased and combed back from by shiny forehead in taught straight furrows.  It suggests a field of grain knocked over by an oil spill.  I am also wearing John Lennon glasses, which serve to accentuate my incredibly long and pointed nose, which throughout the daydream starts to resemble more and more a kinked Phillips-head screwdriver.  The interviewer, a pretty middle aged woman with short dirty blond hair, is wearing a suit of soft yellow.  She looks at me very thoughtfully after asking each questions.  After some initial confusion, it becomes clear that I am “in character” as the subject of my poems, that is, I am acting the part of a fictional character featured in many of my poems.  The interviewer does not seem to care, in fact, she is impressively unflappable, even as the initial confusion gives way to a generally dull and incoherent exchange.  I answer all of her questions sideways, with indirect responses that touch on the subject at hand but offer no satisfying conclusions.  She plows ahead regardless, and I start to feel more and more disenchanted with my little game.  It just isn’t very much fun.  I’m clearly not getting any sort of rise out of her, and since very few people will watch the interview or care about its content, the joke is destined to fall flat.  I am on a sinking ship, a ship that I chose to sink, and that will not be much missed.  I begin to regret my attempted joke.  Why didn’t I just play the interview straight?  Why did I have to hide behind this ridiculous mask?  Was I too insecure to complete the interview honestly?  Did I really think I was putting one over on the mainstream TV watching culture consumers of this country?  What would have been the victory in that, anyway?  Just as the full weight of these questions begins to cloud my sebaceous brow, I am rescued by a shaft of very clear sunlight reaching in through the curtains.  It hits my obnoxious dream self right in the phony-glasses lenses and causes the dreaming me to wake with a start, intensely relieved to be free of a prison of my own device.

Daydream at the office: Hero Worship. 12/3/2008.

W.S. Merwin, one of my literary heroes, visits the hospital where I work. He is a celebrity guest, paired with a young television actress, on a one time cheer-up-some-sick-kids visit.  The actress, a vivacious young blonde I don’t recognize, is surrounded by a horde of PR reps and photographers. W.S. is alone and wearing a rumpled corduroy jacket of a faded, vaguely tan color.  He clearly finds the celebrity end of the situation absurd.  Squeezed out of the area of intense activity by flunkies and pushy cameramen, we find ourselves standing together in a corner.  He asks me where I am from and I tell him I live in Brooklyn. We discuss the gentrification of North Brooklyn and I make several insightful and witty remarks.  As he shoots me an impressed glance, I realize the absurdity of the situation I am imagining and snap out of it.

Dream: Hazy Vampires. 12/2/08.

I find myself at the entrance to a large concrete building, shrouded in thick post-twilight gloom and fog.  I rush into the building and run headlong into Anthony (a real life co-worker).  He is a vampire and, after discarding the notion that he ought to scold me for running inside the building, tries to bite me. I talk him out of this attempted assault with the following line of reasoning: “Just give me one minute, Anthony. One minute. I’ll be right back.” At work, Anthony is very soft spoken and accommodating.  As I would expect, his reaction here is one of resigned disappointed.  I dash up a flight of stairs and find a bedroom very much like my own.  I settle into bed and am immediately set upon by a horde of shadowy figures – more vampires.  They approach from the dark gloom beyond the foot of the bed like a phalanx of black construction paper cut-outs, complete with worn edges and imperfectly shaped heads.  The swiftest shadow vampire is soon upon me, leaning over me and pressing down with a surprising weight as it prepares to pick up where Anthony was rebuffed.  I open my mouth to shout, shift my limbs to struggle, but find to my horror that the weight of this obscene and nebulous creature is more than I can move.  Just as I am about to panic, I wake up, nearly drowned under a hot sweaty pile of blankets and quilt.

Undergraduate Years: I Was Young Not Careless

We didn’t know the train would lurch
forward after it sat so long
emitting every indication
of ultimate quiescence,
its open cars filled with
fat fragrant woodchips,
like a big dinner
digesting overnight.
It didn’t budge an inch
when we landed on it,
the three of us having leapt
from the low open road bridge
like prisoners fleeing
the searchlight full moon,
heads full of liquor,
open jackets flapping
through our brief and shadow-
shrouded flight. We ran,
hurdling above the gaps
between the cars, we mocked
the earthbound eel,
its iron jewelry boxes
sweating heavy industry,
sighing gravity and moribund inertia,
we mocked the very idea
that anyone beyond we happy thieves
could know the thrill of movement,
of dashing so close beneath
the nose of that behemoth moon,
beneath the brows of the encroaching
cloud-quilted night,
between the fingers of air
that could not hold us down.
We heard nothing
of the great snake’s exhalation,
caught no warning on the wind,
and so fell woodchip-scraped
prey to complete surprise
at our sudden landing
on the shores of fresh predicament.
It was during our ignominious descent
down the peeling charcoal ladder
that I tossed my bag below
and broke your birthday present.

Trial One

Ahoy! Let’s try to get this right; the internet is watching.